Cradle

by Arthur C. Clarke

  Vernon could not believe the taste of the crisps. He ate the entire packet while they were walking back to their room. When he was finished, Vernon burst spontaneously into song, singing the Beatles’ ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’. Joanna joined in vigorously on the chorus. She reached up with the side of her fist and playfully banged on the top of his head. Vernon felt jaunty, liberated, as if he had known Joanna forever. He put his arm around her and kissed her ostentatiously as they turned into the driveway leading to their motel.

  They sat on the floor with their snacks spread out in front of them. Vernon turned on the radio. It was tuned to a classical station in the middle of a symphony. Vernon was mesmerized by the sound. For the first time in his life, Vernon could actually hear the individual instruments of the orchestra in his head. He visualized a stage and saw the musicians pulling their bows across the violins. He was fascinated and excited. Vernon told Joanna that all his senses were alive.

  To Joanna Carr, it seemed that Vernon was finally opening up. When he leaned over to kiss her, she was more than willing. They kissed sweetly but deeply several times while the symphony was playing. During a momentary break, Joanna tuned the radio to a rock and roll station. The music changed the pace of their kissing. Driving, jangling sounds increased the tempo and their kisses became more passionate. In his ardour Vernon pushed Joanna down on the floor and they kissed over and over again as they lay side by side, still fully clothed. They became enthralled by the strength of their arousal.

  The radio now started playing ‘Light My Fire’ by the Doors. And Vernon Allen Winters of Columbus, Indiana, third year midshipman at the US Naval Academy, was no longer a virgin by the time the long song was over. Vernon had never lost control of himself before in his entire life. But when Joanna stroked the outline of his swollen penis underneath his jeans, it was as if a giant wall of steel and concrete suddenly gave way. Years later Vernon would still marvel at the raw passion he showed for two, maybe three minutes. The combination of Joanna’s insistent kisses, the grass, and the driving rhythms of the music pushed him over the edge. He was an animal. Still on the floor of the motel room, he pulled vigorously on Joanna’s jeans several times, nearly tearing them as he managed to free them from her hips. Her briefs half-followed them. Vernon grabbed them roughly and pulled them down the rest of the way while he was squirming out of his own jeans.

  Joanna tried in a quiet voice to slow Vernon down, to suggest that maybe the bed would be better. Or at least it would be more pleasant if they actually took off their shoes and socks and didn’t make love with their trousers around their ankles restricting their movement. But Vernon was beyond listening. Years of restraint left him no ability to deal with his own surging desire. He was possessed. He crawled on top of Joanna, a look of frightening seriousness on his face. For the first time she was scared and her sudden fear heightened her sexual excitement. Vernon struggled for a few seconds to find the right spot and then entered her abruptly and forcefully. Joanna felt him drive once, twice, and then shudder all over. He was done in maybe ten seconds. She intuitively knew that it had been his first time, and the pleasure of that knowledge outweighed her bruised feelings about his lack of finesse and gentleness.

  Vernon said nothing and quickly fell asleep on the floor next to Joanna. She went to the bed, pulled the bedspread off, cuddled into Vernon’s arms on the floor, and wrapped the spread around them. She smiled to herself and drifted off to sleep, still a little puzzled by this cadet lying next to her. But she knew that they were now special to each other.

  How special Joanna would never really know. When Vernon woke up the middle of the night, he felt an overpowering sense of guilt. He could not believe that he had smoked dope and then virtually raped a girl he hardly knew. He had lost control. He had been unable to stop what he was doing and had clearly crossed the bounds of propriety. He winced when he thought about what his parents (or worse, Betty and Reverend Pendleton) would think about him if they could have seen what he had done. Then the guilt gave way to fear. Vernon imagined that Joanna was pregnant, that he had to leave Annapolis and marry her (What would he do? What kind of job would he have if he were not a naval officer?), that he had to explain all this to his parents and to the Pendletons. Worse still, he next imagined that at any minute the motel would be raided and the police would find the butt of the joint. He would first be kicked out of the Academy for drug abuse, then find out that he had made a girl pregnant.

  Vernon Winters was now really scared. Lying on the floor of a motel room on the outskirts of Philadelphia at three o’clock on a Sunday morning, he began to pray in earnest. ‘Dear God,’ Vernon Winters prayed, asking for something specific for himself for the first time since he asked God to help him on the day that he took his school exams, ‘let me get out of this without harm and I will become the most perfectly disciplined naval officer you have ever seen. I will dedicate my life to defending this country that honours you. Just please help me.’

  Eventually Vernon managed to fall asleep again. But his sleep was fitful and disturbed by vivid dreams. In one dream Vernon was dressed in his midshipman’s uniform but was on stage back at the Columbus Presbyterian Church. It was the Easter pageant and he was again Christ, dragging the cross to Calvary. The sharp edge of the cross on his shoulder was cutting through his uniform shirt and Vernon was aware of anxiety that he might not pass inspection. He stumbled and fell; the cross cut deeper through the uniform as he had feared and he could see some blood running down his arm.

  ‘Crucify him,’ Vernon heard someone shout in the dream. ‘Crucify him,’ a group of people in the audience shouted together as Vernon tried vainly to see through the klieg lights. He woke up sweating. For a couple of moments he was disoriented. Then again his emotions went the cycle from disgust to depression to fear as he played through the events of the night before.

  Joanna was tender and affectionate after she woke up but Vernon was very distant. He explained his attitude by saying he was worried about his coming exams. A couple of times Joanna started to talk about what had happened the night before, but each time he rapidly changed the subject. Vernon suffered through brunch and the drive back to College Park to Joanna’s sorority house. Joanna tried to kiss him meaningfully when they parted but Vernon did not reciprocate. He was in a hurry to forget the entire weekend. Back in the privacy of his own room in Annapolis, he contritely bargained again with God to let him escape unscathed.

  Midshipman Vernon Winters was true to his word. He not only never talked to Joanna Carr again (she called and failed to reach him a couple of times, sent two letters that were unanswered, and then gave up), he also gave up dating altogether during his final eighteen months at Annapolis. He worked very hard on his studies and attended chapel, as he had promised God, twice each week.

  He graduated with honours and did his initial tour of duty on a large aircraft carrier. Two years later, in June 1974, after Betty Pendleton had completed college and obtained her teacher’s certificate, Vernon married her in the Columbus Presbyterian Church where they had played Joseph and Mary a dozen years earlier. They moved to Norfolk, Virginia, and Vernon believed that the pattern of his life was set. His life would be going out to sea for long stretches and then coming home for short stays with Betty and any children they might have.

  Vernon regularly thanked God for keeping up His part of the bargain and he dedicated himself to being the finest officer in the US Navy. All of his fitness reports praised his dependability and thoroughness. His commanding officers openly told him that he was admiral material. Until Libya.

  Or more specifically, until he returned home after the Libyan action. For the entire world changed for Vernon Allen Winters during the few weeks after the American attack against Gaddafi.

  7

  Carol and Troy were sitting in deck chairs at the front of the Florida Queen. They were facing forward in the boat, toward the ocean and the warm afternoon sun. Carol had removed her purple blouse to reveal the top of a one-pi
ece blue bathing suit, but she was still wearing her white cotton slacks. Troy was shirtless in a white surfing outfit that came most of the way down his legs. His body was lean and sinewy, fit but not overly muscled. They were talking casually and animatedly, laughing often in an easy way. Behind them underneath the canopy, Nick Williams was reading A Fan’s Notes by Fred Exley. Every now and then he would look up at the other two for a few moments and then return to his book.

  ‘So why didn’t you ever go to college?’ Carol was asking Troy. ‘You clearly had the ability. You would have made a fantastic engineer.’

  Troy stood up, took off his sunglasses, and walked to the railing. ‘My brother Jamie said the same thing,’ he said slowly, staring out at the quiet ocean. ‘But I was just too wild. When I finally did graduate from high school, I was hungry to know what the world was like. So I took off. I wandered all over the US and Canada for a couple of years.’

  ‘Was that when you learned about electronics?’ Carol asked. She checked her watch to see what time it was.

  ‘That was later, much later,’ said Troy, remembering. ‘Those two years of wandering I didn’t learn anything except how to survive on my wits. Plus what it was like to be a black boy in a white man’s world.’ He looked at Carol. There was no noticeable reaction.

  ‘I must have had a hundred different jobs,’ he continued, looking back at the ocean. ‘I was a cook, a copyboy, a bartender, a construction worker. I even taught swimming lessons in a private club. I was a bellman in a resort hotel, a greenkeeper for a country club…’ Troy laughed and turned again to see if Carol was paying attention. ‘But I guess you’re not interested in all this….’

  ‘Sure I am,’ Carol said, ‘it’s fascinating to me. I’m trying to imagine what you looked like in a hotel uniform. And if Chief Nick is right, we still have another ten minutes to pass until we reach where we’re going.’ She dropped her voice. ‘At least you talk. The professor is not exactly social.’

  ‘Being a black bellhop at a southern Mississippi resort hotel was an amazing learning experience,’ Troy began, a smile spreading across his face. Troy loved to tell stories about his life. It placed him centre stage. ‘Imagine, angel, I’m eighteen years old and I luck into a job at the grand old Gulfport Inn, right on the beach. Room and board plus tips. I’m on top of the world. At least until the chief bellman, an impossible little man named Fish, takes me out to the barracks where all the bellhops and kitchen staff live and introduces me to everybody as the “new nigger bellhop”. From bits of discussion I can tell that the hotel is in some kind of trouble because of possible racial discrimination and hiring me is part of their response.

  ‘My room in the barracks was right behind the twelfth green on the golf course. A small bunk bed, a dresser built into the wall, a desk or table with a portable lamp, a sink to brush my teeth and wash my face—that’s where I lived for six weeks. Down at the other end of the building was the great community bathroom that everyone left whenever I showed up.

  ‘In my high school in Miami virtually the entire student body was Cuban or black or both. So I knew almost nothing about white people. From books and television I had this fantasy image of whites as handsome, competent, educated, and rich. Ha. My fantasy quickly vanished. You would not have believed the crew that worked in that hotel. The head bellman Fish smoked dope every night with his sixteen-year-old son Danny and dreamed of the day he would find a million dollars left in somebody’s room. His only other goal in life was to continue screwing the chef’s wife, Marie, in the supply closet every morning until he died.

  ‘One of the other bellmen was a poor, lonely soul whose real name was Saint John because his brilliant parents thought that ‘Saint’ was a given name. He had only six teeth, wore thick glasses, and had a giant tumour underneath his left eye. Saint John knew that he was ugly and he worried all the time about losing his job because of his personal appearance. So Fish exploited him unmercifully by giving him all the shittiest assignments and forcing him to pay kickbacks with a portion of his tips. The other bellmen also ridiculed Saint John at every opportunity and made him the butt of their practical jokes.

  ‘One night I was sitting quietly in my room reading a book when there was a soft knock on the door. When I answered it, Saint John was standing there. He looked confused and distracted. He was holding a small box in one hand and a six-pack of beer in the other. I waited a few moments and then asked him what he wanted. He looked nervously in both directions and then asked me if I knew how to play chess. When I told him yes and added that I would enjoy a game, Saint John grinned from ear to ear and mumbled something about being glad that he had taken a chance. I invited him in and we played and talked and drank beer for almost two hours. He was one of nine children from a poor, rural Mississippi family. While we were playing, Saint John casually let slip that he had been a little reluctant to ask me to play because Fish and Miller had told him that niggers were too dumb to play chess.

  ‘Saint John and I became friends, at least sort of, for the few more weeks that I stayed there. We were united by the deepest of bonds: we were both outsiders in that strange social structure created by the employees of the Gulfport Inn. It was from Saint John that I learned about the many misconceptions that Southern whites have about blacks.’ Troy laughed. ‘You know, one night Saint John actually followed me to the bathroom to verify with his own eyes that I was not significantly larger than he was.’

  Troy returned to his deck chair and looked at Carol. She was smiling. It was hard not to enjoy Troy’s stories. He told them with such enthusiasm and self-involved charm. Under the canopy Nick also had put his book aside and was listening to the conversation.

  ‘Then there was this giant Farrell, early twenties, who looked like Elvis Presley. He supplied liquor to the guests at cut rates, operated an escort service on call, and took excess hotel goods to sell at his sister’s market. He rented part of my room to store some of the liquor. What a character. After big convention breakfasts Farrell would pour the leftover orange juice in the pitchers into bottles and keep it for resale. One morning the hotel manager found a case of the juice temporarily sitting in a room off the lobby and demanded to know what was going on. Farrell grabbed me and took me out front. He told me that he wanted to make a deal. If I would admit that I had taken the juice, Farrell would pay me twenty dollars. He explained that if I confessed, nothing would happen to me, because niggers were expected to steal. But if he, Farrell, were caught, he would lose his job….’

  Nick came out from under the canopy. ‘I hate to break this up,’ he said, a little sarcastic edge in his voice, ‘but according to our computer navigator, we are now at the south edge of the region on the map.’ He handed the map back to Carol.

  ‘Thanks, Professor,’ Troy laughed, ‘I believe you saved Carol from being talked to death.’ He walked over to where all the monitoring equipment had been set up on the footlocker next to the canopy. He turned on the power supply. ‘Hey, angel, you want to tell me now how this all works.’

  Dale Michaels’s ocean telescope was programmed to take three virtually simultaneous pictures at each fixed setting. The first of the pictures was a normal visible image, the second was the same field of view photographed at infrared wavelengths, and the third was a composite sonar image of the same frame. The sonar subsystem did not produce crisp pictures, only outlines of objects. However, it probed to greater depths than either the visible or infrared elements of the telescope and could be used even when the water underneath the boat was murky.

  Affixed to the bottom of almost any boat, the compact telescope could be driven thirty degrees back and forth about the vertical by a small internal motor. The observation schedule for the telescope was usually defined by a preprogrammed protocol. The details of this sequence as well as the critical optical parameters for the telescope were all stored in the system microprocessor; however, everything in the software could be changed in real-time by manual input if the operator desired.

 
Data from the telescope was carried to the rest of the electronic equipment on the boat by means of very thin fibre optics. These cables were bracketed along the edge of the boat. About ten percent of the pictures reconstructed from this data were then displayed (after some very crude enhancements) on the boat’s monitor in real-time. But all the data taken by the telescope was automatically recorded in the one hundred gigabit memory unit that adjoined the monitor. Another set of fibre optics connected the same memory unit with the boat’s central navigation system and the servomotor actuators controlling the telescopes. These circuits were pulsed every ten milliseconds so that the orientation of the telescope and the boat’s location at the time of each telescope image could be stored together in the permanent file.

  Next to the monitor on top of the footlocker, but on the other side from the memory unit, was the system control panel. Dr. Dale Michaels and MOI were famous throughout the world for the cleverness of their inventions; however, these ingenious creations were not so easy to operate. Dale had tried to give Carol a crash course on the workings of the system the night before she had driven down to Key West from Miami. It had been almost useless. Eventually frustrated, Dale had simply programmed into the microprocessor an easy sequence that mosaicked the area under the boat in regular patterns. He then set the optical gains at normal default values, and instructed Carol not to change anything. ‘All you have to do,’ Dr. Michaels had said as he had carefully loaded the system control panel into the station wagon, ‘is push this go button. Then cover the panel to make certain that nobody inadvertently hits the wrong command.’

  So Carol certainly could not explain to Troy how anything worked. She walked over beside him on the boat, put her arm on his shoulder, and grinned sheepishly. ‘I hate to disappoint you, my inquisitive friend, but I don’t know any more about how this thing works than I told you when we were setting up all the equipment. To operate it, all we have to do is turn on the power supply, which you have already done, and then push this button.’ She pushed the go button on the panel. A picture of the clear ocean about fifty feet underneath the boat appeared immediately on the colour monitor. The picture was amazingly sharp. The threesome watched in wonder as a hammerhead shark swam through a school of small grey fish, swallowing hundreds of them in his awesome rush.